Students in the Interact Club have completed the trail-clearing labour on a new trail in the vicinity of Georgia Street and the Old Railgrade, they plan to tackle a second trail linking 8th Avenue to Columbia-Kootenay Road on June 19.
The students will also shell out the cash they raised this school year — some $7,000 — for professional trail builders to come in and finish the technical aspects of the trails.
"It went great, we had about a dozen Interact members on Georgia Street," said Marilyn Nelson, the Interact co-ordinator. "They spent four hours on Saturday [June 4] clearing trees, branches, brush, and leaves, and got it all ready for the professional trail builders to go in."
They also spent an hour after school a couple days later to load up a dump truck volunteered by Marwest Industries to haul away the branches and debris. The regional district waived the tipping fee.
After completing the prep work on both trails — No. 18 and No. 22 in Rossland's Active Transportation Plan prepared by Stewart Spooner in 2009 — Interact will now pay for pros to cut the trail and build rock support walls.
"It's pretty steep right now and they have to build it up a little bit," Nelson explained, "but it's all ready to go for them."
About 16 Grade 9 to 12 Interact students raised the $7,000 to fund this project "from scratch" since they nearly emptied their account on an HIV/AIDS clinic project in Honduras last year.
"They've helped out at events, such as a coat check at the Rotary wine-tasting. They've been to every event possible to do bake sales and serve coffee and tea. They time-keep at the hockey games down in Trail. They held a big epicure party. Absolutely everything that they can," Nelson said.
She reported that the Kootenay-Columbia Trail Society is "thrilled."
"Stew Spooner is really happy with [the kids]," she said, "and they had fun."
Part of the fun was unearthing "a couple big deposits from people ages ago. We found an old Singer sewing machine from about a hundred years ago, and some old, old glass bottles," Nelson said. "It was like a treasure hunt."